in case you missed it | Conservative count

Ultra-conservative Sen. Dave Schultheis, R-Colorado Springs, was beating the old anti-immigration drum again this week, although this time he took a slightly different, mischievous tack.

Schultheis, who has made it clear that he wants to rid the state of all illegal immigrants, proposed an amendment to House Bill 1171 on March 29 that would have required schools to count students who are in the country illegally.

Schultheis had the gall to claim in a news release that he was innocently trying to ascertain those figures to help the Department of Education with its budget planning.

“This is simply a fact-finding mission,” he says. “School budgets are stretched to the limit. We’re only trying to get resources where they’re most needed.”

Yeah. Right. Luckily, the Democrats knew Schultheis was up to his old tricks and sniffed out his seemingly innocuous plan. They killed the amendment.

The lead paragraph of the Schultheis news release claims the Dems “shot down” the “common-sense proposal.”

Common sense for narrow-minded bigots, that is.

Schultheis showed his true colors when he offered a second amendment that would have let illegal immigrants or their children skip the state’s CSAP tests.

Probably just out of the goodness of his heart, eh?

Well, no. According to the Colorado Independent, he was doing it to raise CSAP scores, so that those pesky undocumented workers wouldn’t pull down the average.

Thankfully, Dems called both failed amendments by their rightful name.

Discrimination.

Pink tally

Speaking of counting people, have you returned your U.S. Census form yet?

If so, you probably noticed that while the questionnaire asks about your ethnicity, it doesn’t ask about your sexual preference.

Well, the GLBT community wants to be counted, too.

We got a news release from the GLBT Community Center of Colorado about its “Queer the Census” campaign. GLBT people are being provided with bright pink stickers to affix to their Census envelopes, to make a statement.

The Census is used to calculate federal funding and political representation, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force notes that when GLBT people aren’t counted, they don’t count when it comes to services, resources and representation.

The bright spot? For the first time this year, same-sex couples who report themselves as legally married will be counted as married in the 2010 Census.

Billionaire bankers are people, too

Poor little rich men. You’ve just got to feel sorry for them. One minute they were raking it in through sub-prime mortgages and other shell games, playing fast and loose with the nation’s economy. The next they’re getting billions in federal bailouts, big fat bonuses — and bad PR.

Now all Wall Street bankers want is for you to like them again. To that end, they’ve launched a public relations campaign designed to help you trust them once more. Financial Services Roundtable, made up of 150 of the largest financial institutions in the United States, is planning a big campaign that includes a website and the use of social media.

“The only ones out there talking are our critics, and it’s our turn to set the record straight,” Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the Roundtable, told the Associated Press.

Set what record straight? It’s all a matter of public record, how free market capitalist schemers took every advantage they could, squeezing out every dime of profit, until the whole subprime house of cards came tumbling down. But the economic collapse brought to us by Wall Street hasn’t hurt you big bankers as much as it’s hurt the average American.

And now it bothers these bankers that people don’t like them.

Well, tough shit. Given the difficulty they’ve put taxpayers through, Wall Street bankers are only getting what they worked hard to earn.